News

WildCRU student collaborators present top talks at SCCS

April 13, 2015

Jeremy Cusack and Nicolas Galvez were honoured with awards at the recent Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS) in Cambridge.

Jeremy is an Oxford Zoology DPhil student co-supervised by WildCRU’s Dr Amy Dickman. His fieldwork centres on the Ruaha National Park in Tanzania, the focus of WildCRU’s Ruaha Carnivore project. He won 1st place for the best student talk with his presentation ‘Monitoring terrestrial mammal communities with camera traps’ in the New insights on threats and interventions session, where he showed that during the wet season and for low levels of sampling effort, communities were significantly different, and in particular, that the position of species within observed communities shifted considerably depending on the camera placement strategy used. The recommendations will hopefully lead to improved camera trap survey designs for monitoring mammal communities.

Nico is a final year PhD student at the University of Kent in a project collaboration between WildCRU, the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) of the School of Anthropology and Conservation at the University of Kent, UFZ -Germany and his local institution Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile-Villarrica campus. Co-supervised by WildCRU’s Director, Professor David Macdonald, he is focussing on ecological and social dynamics in agricultural landscapes of the güiña (Leopardus guigna / VU IUCN Redlist), camera-trapping, and surveying local farmers. He won 3rd place for the best student talk in the Cats and Conflicts session with his presentation ‘Assessing factors in the decline of the guiña in southern Chile’.